


Silence Reigns

by Infini



Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Prime
Genre: Blood, Blood Drinking, Claustrophobia, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Injury, Isolation, Mental Instability, Panic Attacks, Psychological Trauma, Starvation, shadowzone
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-01
Updated: 2015-10-01
Packaged: 2018-04-24 05:19:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4906969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Infini/pseuds/Infini
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Decepticons are gone.<br/>Megatron is dead.<br/>The Autobots are ignorant, or perhaps simply ignoring his existence.<br/><br/>Soundwave failed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Failure

**Author's Note:**

> Some bits of fic I wrote as backstory for a tumblr RP blog I had, a couple of years ago.  
> It also leads into a fic that's been floating around my head for a while. Perhaps I'll post some of that, too.

He must not wake Laserbeak.

Recharge came fitfully for both of them, but especially the tiny deployer docked into his chassis. Their bond was more than just physical, and any significant thought or action on one’s part would pull the other back to consciousness in an instant. Even when they had been many, they would never all recharge at the same time; it was a matter of safety, of security, and of trust. They would not be caught by surprise.

Once, they had been many. 

It was strange how cold everything felt. Not in relation to ambient temperatures; they were well within acceptable parameters. But despite the fact that the Nemesis’ engines were still operating, infusing the ship’s solid surfaces with vibration and its atmosphere with a faint hum, it seemed disconnected, somehow. The best comparison he could find was something akin to watching a recording or transmission, instead of experiencing it first-hand. A barrier had been thrown between him and the ship, him and the rest of the world. 

A barrier he could not find his way back through. 

He must not wake Laserbeak. 

Deployers were known as impulsive, unpredictable mechs, and not without reason. In turn, carriers were anchors, pillars against which they could moor themselves. One provided stability and protection, one produced life and energy. Together, they made two halves of a whole, as beautiful a symbiosis as any Primus had ever created. 

What happened, then, when the source of stability was the one that came loose?

The only things that felt real were himself and his deployer. More and more often, he found himself wrapping digits around his own arms, pressing palms against plating simply so he could feel something alive. He already knew that touching any other living mech was impossible, thanks to whatever the humans had done to him.

Quite some time had been spent parsing whether or not this meant that Trypticon, the Nemesis, was considered dead.

He must not wake Laserbeak.

There was no new data to collect, to analyze, to process. Without the present to give him work, his processors dredged into the past. His actions, his inactions, his choices, all gathered and waiting to be picked apart. He had a good memory, a very good memory: Megatron had relied upon it, to draw information at a moment’s notice, to analyze battle plans and keep his warship running. He had stored records so critical that no one else could be given access to them, except by the Decepticon leader’s word. Megatron trusted him.

Megatron was dead.

He must not wake Laserbeak.

Megatron was dead.

The humans had been a factor he hadn’t calculated on. A slight glitch, he’d thought, but not significant enough to warrant changing their tactics. He had tried to remove them from the ship the same way they’d arrived. That had been a mistake.

His first mistake in a very, very long time.

He was not permitted to make mistakes. They were at war, where mistakes cost lives, battles, and resources. Misjudgements were not tolerated; miscalculations were not acceptable. The longer their war had dragged on, the worse the punishments had become. Their leader slowly learned that they had no time to make up for what was lost from the misdeeds of foolish mechs, and because he failed less while others grew sloppy, the responsibility for those things which required nothing less than complete success were placed on his pauldrons.

It was their last stand, Megatron had said. And in that final, critical moment, faced with the Autobots invasion of their ship, their base, their home, it had been the most trusted officer who had let him down.

The sound of shrilling metal did not distract him as three parallel silver streaks were scraped through the paint of his helm. They were hardly the first. He leaned back against the wall and curled inward, the other bladed arm arching over his chest, over his spark, over the only thing left that mattered, while his processors did what they did best: analysis, of every thought and choice and action that had led to this point.

He knew the conclusion that would be drawn. It was as evident and inescapable as the slow decrease of his energon levels; easily ignored when focus could be directed elsewhere, but always waiting in the background.

Then the bond lit up, suddenly awake and alive and so full of _support/unity/care_ that his circuits practically choked on it. There was a sound as his vents stuttered, though there was no one else to hear, and double-jointed knees buckled as he brought both arms to wrap around Laserbeak.

He swallowed the flood of emotion as though it were fuel, enough to keep him functional, to pin him down as the anchor he needed to be. But even that was wrong, he knew; his own deployer couldn’t so much as take a few joors to recharge, without being awakened from the outside. It all added up to the same thing, the conclusion his processors had already provided.

Soundwave: failed.


	2. Perchance To Dream

When Laserbeak declined an offer to take a flight around the abandoned hallway, he knew it had to be done.

All flying Cybertronians, from the largest shuttle-frame to the smallest deployer, needed to make use of that ability.  It was a part of their programming, as core-deep as transformation; many flight-capable mechs were fearful of being underground, simply for the fact that it removed their ability to take to the skies at a moment’s notice.

Soundwave had not been sparked into an aerial frame, and lacked that certain instinct.  So had Megatron, his processor idly reminded him, though he shunted the thought process aside before it could go any further.  When he’d been reconstructed into this body, Laserbeak had taken a certain delight in teaching his carrier as much as he could about flight, and those who engaged in it.  One of his first lessons was that a sparked flyer would never refuse an opportunity to do what they were made to do.  The reasons they might give were many and varied: that it was faster; that it gave them a wider field of view; that travelling by land was beneath them (literally or metaphorically)…  But in every one, their protests could be refined down to the fact that they loved to fly.  There was nothing more natural to a seeker, an aerialist, or a space-capable craft, than the feeling of defying gravity.

They both knew what it meant, when he turned the opportunity down.

Refusal wasn’t a matter of distaste for their locale, its narrowness, or the futility of flying in circles.  They had reached the point where conservation of energy outweighed practically all other considerations.  Laserbeak already spent much of the time recharging, occasionally returning to consciousness solely to allow his carrier some rest.  It was wrong to force the deployer to remain in this state, where his instincts grated against spark and chassis, trying to force him to burn their collective energy faster in order to satisfy it.  There was only one solution: simple, obvious, and painless.

Still, he hesitated.

And he hated himself for it.  It was his own weakness which kept him from following through on the sensible course of action.  Such behaviour was unacceptable from any Decepticon, but especially the third in command.  It was necessary to uphold the values they had spent so much time defending, even if there was no one else to bear witness.

His pride was one of the few things that remained.

None of this was specifically communicated between carrier and deployer, but there really was no need.  Even without their bond, the fact that Soundwave spent much of a joor stroking one of Laserbeak’s wings with a single digit said more than any combination of glyphs would have.  He remained crouched, dorsal plating against the wall, unwilling to sit in case any Autobots might pass by and open the doors; the structure of his legs made it difficult to stand rapidly.  The presence of others was far less frequent than it used to be, their time likely being spent working on reconstructing Cybertron rather than the interior of a warship.  The Nemesis’ engines still hummed, but low and idle, while corridor lights were dimmed to the barest levels of necessity.  Why waste power when no one as using it?

 _It’s okay_ , crooned Laserbeak, pressing _reassurance/acceptance_ through every connection they had.  Carrier was the only one who could get them both out of here, and that meant all resources should go to him and his efforts. He understood, they both understood, that splitting energon with a second frame was a liability, an expense they couldn’t afford.

Which was ridiculous.  They both knew that Soundwave was not in a proper state of mind, and it was the deployer who served to draw him back to the present, when his focus slid into spirals.  Fuelling one body instead of two might buy them more time, but whether those purchased cycles could be used effectively was another matter entirely.

There would be nothing left to separate him from the silence.

Laserbeak could have started the process from his side, but he waited for his carrier to begin.  As much as Soundwave would be reluctant to do so, the alternative was for the tiny flyer to be the one who put up the first barriers between them.  He was not trying to remove himself.  He was not leaving.

They sang through the bond, sharp-edged highs and blunted lows flowing from one to the other.  By the time the protocols were up and running, there were three digits tracing lines up and down the deployer’s chassis.  Laserbeak’s notes grew slow and unfocused, as though falling into a particularly deep recharge, but having half his processors offline didn’t weaken his confidence.  If anyone could find a way out of this situation, it was his carrier.  He was not afraid.  His life was always in Carrier’s hands, and this was no different.  No matter what, they were together…

When he could no longer sing, he hummed, and when that failed, his fields streamed emotion from spark to spark.  Little by little, that warmth ebbed away, the metaphorical space between them filled with nothing more than empty atmosphere.

And Soundwave was alone.


	3. Waking Nightmares

It had been cycles since there had been any signs of life within detectable range. His systems helpfully provided the exact number, but he chose to ignore it. While all knowledge was worth having, not all of it was worth acknowledging.

The protests of his displeased leg struts had finally won out, forcing him to take a seat on the hallway floor. No Autobots, Eradicons, or even drones had come through this corridor for long enough that saving energy was a greater priority than maintaining a state of constant readiness. He’d be able to hear them coming before they opened any doors, if they were headed this way. But this was an unimportant section of the ship, by all standards; he’d only allowed himself to fall behind the last patrol because of the computer console a few paces away. Like the others, it was completely unresponsive to his attempts to access it, but he’d had to try.

And he was still trying. It was better than the alternative.

He needed to keep his processors occupied somehow, even if it was with nothing more than busywork. The silent pressure around his audials had worked its way into his helm, and only by keeping his attention on something else would he ensure that it all didn’t come crashing down again.

In addition to trying every form of hacking he possessed on the unresponsive console, he’d written three additional encryptions for his vocalizer, as well as an entirely new randomization algorithm for the most recent of the former. Thanks to the uncontrolled nature of the passwords generated for the third code, it would take at least ten nano-kliks of concentrated effort to break through. If he had enough mental power to focus on solving the code, then he would not be in a state where it was at risk of a brute force override.

The singular lock previously in place had come dangerously close to being broken, last time.

Experience was teaching him to anticipate such occurrences as they approached. There were signs: his digits would rattle, processors began winking offline erratically, and the hum of the ship would grow distant before disappearing entirely. If he caught himself in time, he could throw up barriers of distraction; calculating the fuel levels of the Nemesis based on average power consumption over the course of his imprisonment, or simply playing half a dozen Cybertronian anthems at once while trying to pick out each instance of a particular instrument. If he could work, if he could keep busy, the sensation of mounting pressure would recede. If not…

Laserbeak was no longer able to talk him through these episodes. He hadn’t realized how utterly debilitating it was, when there was nothing to drag his focus back to the world outside his helm. More than once, he’d found himself with paint on his digits and error messages through his systems, crouching in a corner without remembering when he’d moved. The incidents weren’t always the same: sometimes his tanks would roll, threatening to waste what little fuel remained; sometimes his thoughts would stall out under the weight of uncontrollable panic, leaving his mind completely blank; sometimes his spark spun so fast he was certain his chamber would burst, and that would be the end of him, and Laserbeak.

By turns, it was infuriating and terrifying. He was losing grip on one of the few things that remained under his control: his mind. His greatest strength was turning against him, slipping out of his grasp, no longer obeying his commands or desires. If he could no longer think, if his mind could no longer be relied upon, then there was no chance of escaping this place.

As expected, that realization only made matters worse. It perched on his mountain of failures like a crown, among the ragged spark-borne scars where three deployers used to be, the gaping wounds of a blade tearing through the embodiment of his purpose, the holes in his mind where sound and information had been replaced with virulent silence.

Having lost everything else, he mused while paging through every document he possessed on the subject of groundbridges, it made sense that he would lose himself too. But he would not go without a fight.

High-priority systems had been routed to searching for known signals within as great a range as he could manage, with a few additional coding tweaks to ensure that nothing would shut the scans down as long as energon remained. From there, he began the slow process of calculating exactly how the two groundbridges he’d been trapped between had resulted in the present situation. If he worked backward from what he had experienced, using his collected bridging data, it should be possible to reverse-engineer a method of counteracting the process.

Using a groundbridge to compute the appropriate parameters would have taken kliks, but he didn’t have that option. What he did have was a series of long and convoluted calculations which would keep his drives busy for quite some time… Far too busy for that pressure to begin scraping the edges of his thoughts.

The fact that there was no one who could utilize the resulting coordinates was not brought into the matter. When he found an open signal, it would be put to good use. Once he and Laserbeak were freed from this place, they would locate some fuel, and then find the Autobots. He would face the Prime, and his yellow scout. What they might do to him, he wasn’t certain, but it could not be worse than what had already been done. They had taken his deployers. His leader. His freedom.

A nearby rattling disrupted his primary thought conduit, and he glanced around to find the source. It was too loud to be any of the hallway’s machinery, and too close to be the sound of something approaching-

His own hands. They were shaking, the first joints of his digits tapping gently against the overarching plating of his arm. He clenched them tightly, but they refused to stop their involuntary movements; he could feel tremors climbing his primary nerve cables.

He’d allowed himself to be side-tracked.

Where had he left off, in his calculations? Thoughts scrambled to reattach the lost end, but it was nowhere to be found as thick and scraping claws began cutting through his processor threads. Everything was spiralling away, pieces of things he could no longer identify vanishing into the gaping void of silence that yawned beneath him. There was nothing left to grab, nothing he could hold onto, except himself.

Both hands pressed against his helm, digits curling around the points and finials as his fuel pump screamed, and he fell again.


	4. Crash

The Nemesis was Megatron’s vessel to command, but Soundwave theorized that it was possible he knew its moods a little better. He had spent Earth-years plugged into the ship, receiving constant updates from every system it had, and with that intimacy came a certain kind of understanding. That was how he knew, despite his lack of hardline or wireless connections, that something was happening.

Engines cycled up, the thrum of fuel lines increasing their pitch as more fuel was converted from energon into power. Judging by the fact that it didn’t plateau at a standard running rate suggested that either it was going to attempt interplanetary flight, or…

The ship shuddered, and his sensitive audials picked up the sounds of distant weapons fire. The second option, that the Autobots were powering weapons as well as increasing flight speed, became the more likely of the two. Soundwave’s processors were already running battle algorithms, despite the fact that he had nothing with which to act on them. They had a high likelihood of being wildly inaccurate, but he found it even more probable that no one currently trying to control the vessel had any idea what they were doing. Certainly not as well as him.

It wasn’t arrogance, and he didn’t think of it that way; it was simply the truth. Why should anyone have more knowledge? He was the one who spent the most time learning, running, and improving the Nemesis’ systems. Perhaps Trypticon himself might know more, but the massive machine was no longer sentient. Shockwave had seen to that, after learning of the incident involving dark energon.

He tried to keep his balance while the empty corridor began to lean dangerously, but there was very little to hold onto. Deep support structures groaned at the shifting weight; while sufficiently large space vessels did generally possess internal gravity generators, it didn’t keep their internal construction from being affected by outside forces. Clearly the Autobots had shut off that particular system some time ago, Soundwave noted, because he was currently leaning against a wall in order to maintain his balance.

Something was happening to the Nemesis, to their flagship, and he didn’t know what it was. The lack of knowledge, the sense of his own powerlessness, sent his spark spinning into high-gear, but there was too much else to pay attention to for him to succumb. Every sensory system he possessed was extended to its limits, trying to gather as much information as he could and draw conclusions about what might be happening.

Not that he needed anything more than basic audial settings, to detect the explosion of one of the ship’s engines.

Long digits had only just managed to grasp a nearby support beam when the screaming vessel plunged to the surface of what had once been its home. The impact was more force than a mind could grasp, and he was nothing but a pebble to the Nemesis’ mountain; walls buckled, floors heaved, and the miniscule weight of a single mech was launched like a bullet through the collapsing corridor.

Only spark-deep instinct allowed him to curl himself around his spark, around Laserbeak, before his unwanted flight came to a brutal end. Pain burst through sensory nets, errors flooding processors. Frame unable to respond.

Optics losing focus.

A ceiling panel breaking free-

_No-_


End file.
